Hexagram 7: Shi

Earth over Water · 地水师 · Tendency: Inauspicious

Structure

• Number: 7 (King Wen sequence)
• Symbol: ䷆
• Upper trigram: Kun (Earth)
• Lower trigram: Kan (Water)
• Lines: yin yang yin yin yin yin (bottom to top)

The statement

贞丈人吉，无咎。

——《周易》

What this hexagram indicates

Matters involve organization, teams, rules, or pressure, requiring someone to unify direction. It's suitable to first clarify goals, division of labor, and discipline before taking action. Don't charge ahead based on emotion, and don't let everyone do their own thing. If leadership is insufficient or goals are off track, it can easily lead to internal friction.

A Buddhist reading

Shi means the multitude, and Ouyi Zhixu turns it into the countless remedies that answer countless afflictions, using the upright to cure the crooked. An army is like medicine. He insists on knowing the illness before dispensing, the way a veteran commander reads terrain and knows where a road opens or closes; a remedy that misses its target harms the patient. Water within the earth means every state of mind holds both its own ease and its own antidote, so the eighty four thousand kinds of worldly toil are themselves eighty four thousand gates of practice, none clung to and none discarded.

After Ouyi Zhixu (1599-1655), whose Chan commentary on the Changes reads each hexagram as a stage of practice.

The statement is quoted from the Book of Changes, which is in the public domain. The English reading on this page was prepared for this library.

Related hexagrams

• Previous: Hexagram 6: Song
• Next / Inverted: Hexagram 8: Bithe whole figure turned upside down
• Opposite: Hexagram 13: Tong Renevery line changed to its opposite
• Nuclear: Hexagram 24: Fulines two to four below, three to five above

Related

• Liu Yao Divination ChartLiu Yao casts a hexagram about one specific matter and reads its structure. Unlike BaZi or Zi Wei, which describe a person, Liu Yao describes how a situation stands at a particular moment. This page walks through the full process from casting to attribution.
• Mei Hua Yi Shu CalculatorMei Hua Yi Shu is traditionally attributed to Shao Yong. What sets it apart is how freely it casts: a time, a spoken number, a direction or something noticed in passing will all serve. It attaches no stems and no relatives, reading the trigrams directly. This page covers casting through to the subject and object.